Monday, July 14, 2014

Let's Go to Bed


 
 
Chris Doyle has work in a show up at 21 C Cincinnati called "Hybridity," so I googled him and got his website and stumbled into this suite of watercolors he did based on slept-in motel beds.  Each has a voluptuous ardor, like windswept gowns, or oceans crashing into reefs, but also a sort of solemn, stone-like morbidity, rock-star coffins, dirty linens as love-letters and/or suicide notes. 
 
The poetry just flows because Doyle has focused in on something right there in front of your face and yet he has fetishized it carefully into a set-aside, a moment you want to return to even though you've never been a part of it before.  You can go off on adultery here, or laziness, or a Madame-Bovary mix of both.  Luxury like cake icing just shimmers.  
 
I've never really loved watercolors before.  They always seem so timid and self-righteous somehow, flat and free of trouble and yet also fussy.  Here they are gossamer and gloss, the costumes of ghosts pretending to be lovesickness. 
 
 
 
 
 


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